Books That Changed My Life

Yet who reads to bring about an end however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practise because they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are final? And is not this among them? I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards -- their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble -- the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading."
    -- The Second Common Reader by Virginia Wolff

Notice that though I started out at a young age reading difficult books, I was really a "late bloomer", not finding myself intellectually until I was in my thirties, nor professionally until my mid-forties....  Kins Collins.

my age
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13	John J. O'Neill	Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla (1944)	he book I lived by for five years. Tesla was an electrical engineer and inventor, who in 1882 worked out to the last detail -- and later patented -- our present system of polyphase A.C. power generation, distribution, and use (induction-motor). In the 1890's his focus shifted to developing a system of wireless power-distribution (entailing wireless telecommunications), in which pursuit he made many fundamental discoveries and inventions (e.g., frequency tuning). However, financing for the power distribution scheme fell through, and his advances in radio, though they contributed to the success of others (Marconi, DeForest, Armstrong), brought Tesla himself neither fame nor fortune. His ideas and ways of thinking and behaving were inspiring to me as a young teenager and seemed worthy of emulation. Tesla, son of a Serbian-Orthodox minister and growing up in an ethnically-mixed village in what is now Croatia, was polyglot and could speed-read in 16 different languages, had memorized Faust, read all of Voltaire, devoured Newton, etc. Unfortunately I was not up to this! -- though I tried.
In almost every step of progress in electrical power engineering, as well as in radio, we can trace the spark of thought back to Nikola Tesla. There are few indeed who in their lifetime see realization of such a far-flung imagination. E.F.W. Alexanderson Tesla's ingenious invention of the polyphase system as well as his explorations of the amazing phenomenon of high frequency oscillations were the basis for developing completely new conditions for industry and radio communications, and had a profound influence upon civilization. Niels Bohr
15	Lillian & Hugh Lieber	The Einstein Theory of Relativity: A Trip to the Fourth Dimension	The book looks popular, with its cute abstract drawings, but doesn't stint on the mathematics. The Special Theory, as the authors handled it, presented no problems for me, but their treatment of the General Theory, which included a development of tensor calculus, was rough going.
	A. Square	Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1880)	A marvelous little book that teaches you something of 4-dimensional Euclidean geometry by describing the situation of a 2-dimensional being attempting to understanding our 3-dimensional world.
	George Gamow	Birth and Death of the Sun	Made me want to be an astrophysicist. I was particularly intrigued by Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams and the stellar evolutionary paths they implied. Also the Sun's complex nuclear-fusion reactions (discovered independently by Bethe and von Weizäcker in 1938) seemed to me to promise real understanding of how the world works.
	Sigmund Freud	A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis	Added a new dimension to my understanding of life.
	S. I. Hayakawa	Language in Action	A good book by a General Semanticist, a follower of Korzybski, but I did not otherwise pursue the latter's ideas, though at the Univeristy of Chicago they were very much "in the air" when I arrived there.
	S. Thompson	Calculus Made Easy	I started the Semat book (next entry), but soon got stuck without knowing calculus. Calculus Made Easy is a godsend for anyone who wishes to learn quickly just the manipulative aspects of calculus. I was attending a boarding school at the time (Cranbrook School for Boys), and reading after "lights out" was strictly forbidden. I nevertheless read deep into the night without discovery by covering my desk and desk lamp with a blanket, my alertness aided by instant coffee. In this manner I read every night for several months the Thompson book and then Semat, doing all the exercises as I proceeded.
Cranbrook School for Boys (dormitory)
16	Henry Semat	Introduction to Atomic Physics	A good college-level textbook using differential and integral calculus. Made me want to be a nuclear physicist, hence my choice of Univ. of Chicago (the foremost place for studying atomic physics at that time owing to the presence of Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller), which I now actively sought to enter. My parents were opposed to my entering college before finishing high school, and disliked besides the Univ. of Chicago, which was purportedly "run by left-wingers". But after the University on the basis of my SAT scores accepted my application and granted me a tuition scholarship, they much to their credit relented and allowed me to go. Had I gone anyplace else -- MIT, for instance, my previous goal -- my story here would have been a very different one, and my life would have been much more one-sided. The University of Chicago was a new universe, and I will be forever grateful to my parents for respecting my judgment -- though I was only sixteen -- that it was the best place for me. I graduated after 3 years.
University of Chicago (Harper Library) Education is not to teach men facts, theories or laws, not to reform or amuse them or make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellect, teach them to think straight, if possible, but to think nevertheless. Robert Maynard Hutchins
	Banesh Hoffmann	The Strange Story of the Quantum	Semat, above, had downplayed the bizarreness of the world that quantum mechanics creates; Hoffmann revels in it.
	Mortimer J. Adler	How To Read a Book	Prepared me for the very intensive reading of difficult classic texts (above all, Plato and Aristotle), which, along with small discussion classes -- 20 students max -- led by talented young academics (David Riesman, Daniel Bell, William McNeill, Joseph Axelrod, Joe Schwab, etc.), was the essence of pedagogical method at Robert Maynard Hutchins' College of the University of Chicago.
C     h     i     c     a     g     o
17	Oswald Spengler	Decline of the West	uite apart from his own ideas, which one can reject, the value of Spengler is that he brings together and illuminates a vast range of cultural material. The Great-Books base of my Chicago studies -- solid as it was in philosophy, science, and literature -- was weak in art and music, and that's where Spengler was strong. I read the book avidly, with encyclopedia at hand. Working through it turned me into an educated person.
19	J. W. N. Sullivan	Beethoven: His Spiritual Development	I'm ashamed to include this book in this list, but the truth is, for a few years I followed it. The book's content consists of totally subjective impressions of what the music "means" in terms of Beethoven's "spiritual state", assertions impossible to justify from the notes on the scores. Sullivan was a ... mathematician.
20	George F. Kennan	American Diplomacy, 1900-1950	Kennan was chairman of the State Department's Policy Planning Committee, and an intelligent and highly-educated career Foreign Service officer. His group decided all long-term American foreign policy (subject to approvals, etc., etc.). I heard the original public lectures at the Univ. of Chicago which formed the basis for this book, and was impressed by the depth of historical insight Kennan brought to his analysis of current affairs. My plan now was to prepare for a career in the U. S. Foreign Service.
21	Hans J. Morgenthau	Politics Among Nations	Like Thucydides (implicitly) and Machiavelli, Morgenthau, refugee from Nazi Germany and professor of political science at the Univ. of Chicago, turns international politics into a logical system. (I would now say he unfortunately leaves out das Primat der Innenpolitik.)
24	Max Weber	"The Social Causes of the Decay of Ancient Civilization" (1896)	Short essay, but was the spark that grew into my later burning interest in computers (simulations). Thank you, Dr. Ferd Sax, for giving me a copy! In essence Weber attempts to show that the breakdown in the Roman Empire's defenses around 400 AD was caused by the economic disruption that ensued when Rome ceased to expand and fewer military captives were brought into the slave market, which raised the price of slaves and hence the prices of all products made by slaves. This led to a rise in the cost of food (and also led to social changes in the countryside), and so eventually the cost of production of all products and services rose, leading to a contraction of the economy and a decrease in government revenue. The state's defenses were weak for lack of money.
25	Grove's	Article "Sonata Form-b" in Dictionary of Music and Musicians (5th ed.,1954)	After studying this long article I finally understood how so-called "first-movements" were put together. Now I found sonata-form movements everywhere and took childish delight in being able to identify the sonata elements in each piece I heard (1st theme in the tonic, 2nd theme in the dominant, then the development section in a succession of many keys, finally the recapitulation of the themes with both now in tonic, plus perhaps a coda). Bruckner's Fourth Symphony, not a propitious target, was the first work I successfully so analyzed. But then came sloes of Haydn and Mozart string quartets. And with Beethoven's output, I soon came to realize that practically every movement in every genre that he ever wrote, including the slow movements and minuets, were written in sonata form. Grove's article on sonata form included an excellent analysis of the second movement of Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. However, the composer I value most, J. S. Bach, knew nothing of sonata form, having lived before its development.
26	Leonard B. Meyer	Emotion and Meaning in Music	I've always been perplexed about how/why music can cause such intense intellectual pleasure, and what real justification can we have to say "Piece A is better than piece B"? Meyer addresses these questions, and for some years after reading his book (I also attended his seminar on Late Beethoven Quartets) I was less perplexed, but I now see that he committed the "naturalistic fallacy", attempting to prove a value judgment from a statement of fact... so it's back to square 1.
H     e     i     d     e     l     b     e     r     g
33	Ernst Topitsch	Sozialphilosophie zwischen Ideologie und Wissenschaft (Essays)	ocial Philosophy Between Ideology and Science. I became a worshiper at the feet of this great Austrian professor, hearing his complete cycle of lectures over four years at Heidelberg. To say he was a sociologist of philosophy, is correct, but hardly begins to characterize his thought. He was educated by the post-WW II remnants of the Vienna Circle. (Heinrich Gomperz, Victor Kraft); his majors were Classical philology and philosophy. His doctoral dissertation was on Thucydides.
35	Karl Popper	The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934)	Basic for my present world-view. Though I read the book itself, I also heard its ideas everyday in the lectures of the second great professor I followed in Germany, Hans Albert. Karl Popper, a Viennese, knew the members of the Vienna Circle well and debated with them, but was vehemently opposed to some of the basic tenants of their Logical Positivism.
	Rudolf Carnap	Einführung in die symbolische Logik	Introduction to Symbolic Logic. Caused a real shift in my life -- back to my roots. I read it systematically, two hours per day, till I finished it. I was amazed that I understood it extremely well, when others said it was so difficult. I eventually was teaching logic. Carnap was a key member of the Vienna Circle in the Thirties. (See R. B. Jones' synopsis of Philosophy and Logical Syntax, 1935, where traditional metaphysics is relegated to the category of "lyrical verses".)
36	Hans Albert	Traktat über kritische Vernunft	Albert -- economist, sociologist, logician, philosopher of science, teacher, friend -- was one of the two outstanding thinkers I worshipped in Germany. His Traktat, available also in English, presents his "critical rationalism" position in the studdel of competing theories of what science and society are about. Albert and Topitsch constituted a bulwark of reason against the almost overwhelming forces of traditional metaphysical and obscurantist philosophy in Germany.
	Ludwig Wittgenstein	Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)	Essential reading for anyone interested in logic or the philosophy of science. Wittgenstein was a student of Bertrand Russell and inspired the foundation of the Vienna Circle and Logical Positivism.
	Gottlob Frege	Über Sinn und Bedeutung	On Sense and Reference. The logician Frege discusses the dichotomy between the meaning (Sinn)we attach to a symbol (or word) and what it is that the symbol refers to in the world (Bedeutung),especially in connection with mathematical symbols (teacher of Carnap).
	W. V. Quine	Methods of Logic	Another master of formal logic (student of Carnap). In Methods of Logic Quine develops an extremely practical method of constructing formal proofs in the logic of relations.
41	Noam Chomsky	Selected Readings on Linguistics	At Pennsylvania and Harvard Chomsky studied linguistics, mathematics, and philosophy, disciplines he later combined in his own work as he formulated an entirely new theory of language, whose acceptance within the science of linguistics has amounted to a paradigm shift for that science. Grammar (in one of its senses) is the scientific theory of how human speech is made. In Chomsky's system of grammar -- his generative and transformational grammar-- there are two principles, neurologically grounded in the brain, that account for speech: (#1.) Rules of Formation (largely unconscious), which generate "deep-structure" sentences. Such sentences include not only simple "noun phrase + verb phrase" sentences, but also those resulting from the combining, compounding, and subordinating of basic sentences into legal sentences of any degree of complexity. The resultant "productions" are the so-called "deep structure" of what we speak. A further set of rules, the (#2.) Rules of Transformation (again largely unconscious) produce "surface-structure" sentences. These rules take as input the hidden, deep-structure sentences and output final, surface-structure sentences -- the ones we are aware of in our minds and which we actually speak out or write. The transformation rules are what produce, for instance, sentences in passive mood, nouns that signify complete actions, infinitive phrases, etc. out of simple, straight-forward "noun phrase + verb phrase" sentences. Each language has its own set of concrete Formation and Transformation rules, and he advocated that these rules be formalized in terms of modern mathematical notations. Chomsky's exposition of this theory in his doctoral dissertation Syntactic Structures(1957) had a profound influence on the invention of the first (artificial) languages for computers (and got him a chair at MIT). Compare: (1.) Festscrift -- summary, intro, full. (2.) Speech at Yale.
43	Wolfgang J. Mommsen	Das Zeitalter des Imperialismus, 1885-1918	The Age of Imperialism, 1885-1918. W. Mommsen, whom I knew personally from Alpbach (see below) but whose work I had not read until this book, I consider the greatest contemporary historian. Combining traditional German scholarship's mastery of the sources with an approach stemming from social historians like Conze and showing the influence of Marx, Max Weber, and the French school of the Annalen, Mommsen -- the latest scion of a famous family of historians -- achieves a convincing synthesis of how history moves. (My feeble attempt at translation.)
46	Herbert A. Simon	"A Formal Theory of Interaction in Social Groups" (1952) in Mathematical Models of Man	As I read Simon's paper, with its differential equations describing a theory, I immediately saw that the material was eminently suitable for computer simulation. The night I read it (7/7/77 -- I'm still not a believer in magic) I had a dream that presented my whole life before my eyes at once ... and computers were part of that. The next day I started reading about computer hardware and software, and have never looked back.
Programming is, simply, mathematical logic in action; the melding of theory and practice is so complete that most practitioners have no idea that their speech --- recursion, lexical scope, data abstraction, even those banes of C novices, pointers, referencing and dereferencing --- is prose. Cosma Rohilla Shalizi
47	Niklaus Wirth	Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs	A very dense, hence difficult-to-read, book, which contains all the essentials of computer programming.
49	Dahl, Dijkstra, & Hoare	Structured Programming	A classic, paradigm-shifting, book, whose analyses and dictums, once so controversial, now, given the pace of events in the software field, seem obvious, but also quaint and antique.
S     i     l     i     c     o     n          V     a     l     l     e     y
re- cent	Bjarne Stroustrup	Design and Evolution of C++	troustrup is the designer and implementer of the computer programming language C++, which today is used more than any other, because in so many ways it is the best. (The new language Java, a simplified C++, may be better for some everyday programming use.) Stroustrup is a fantastic writer and thinker -- and elegant designer, and this book is destined to become a classic.
	Other books & teachers (What I've read lately)

Teachers Who Changed My Life

my age

7 - 8	2nd & 3rd grade	Miss Olga M. Martin	xtraordinary grade school teacher. Taught us the solar system, how it is held together by gravity, how the laws of gravity were discovered by Newton and are mathematical in form -- the start of my scientific bent.
15	10th grade	geometry teacher, Mr. ??	Just by following what I guess was the normal Euclid-based plane geometry syllabus of those days, the teacher introduced me to deductive proofs and axiom systems.
16 16 16 18	University of Chicago	Enrico Fermi Edward Teller Rudolf Carnap Joe Schwab	Fermi and Teller can be called my teachers only in a loose sense. They wouldhave been my teachers had I stayed in physics. At sixteen I used to pester Fermi with questions after his lectures (he was always extremely gentle and kind!). I started in math and physics, but discovered there was more to life than that. Carnap, whose symbolic logic course I attended, I didn't know was famous until 15 years later. Joe Schwab was the greatest teacher I ever had (philosophy).
21	Northwestern University	Allen S. Whiting Hans J. Morgenthau	Whiting was a friend and teacher -- political science & Chinese history. Morgenthau was on loan from the Univ. of Chicago.
26	University of Chicago	Mortimer Chambers William Halperin Donald Lach Louis Gottschalk William McNeill	Each of my European history profs was great, each in his own unique way. McNeill was my thesis advisor for the M.S. in history.
28	Goethe Institute, Rothenburg, Germany	Fräulein Wirth	Fräulein Wirth was a teacher at the Goethe Institute's summer program in the German language and had a Ph.D. in art history. She took our class to see churches and museums in the area around the German Renaissance walled town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber (Creglingen, Feuchtwangen, Dinkelsbühl, Nördlingen, Nürnberg, Stuttgart). And after the course, on a tip from her, I visited -- for two days! -- the shimmeringly beautiful late-Barock Wieskirche in Bavaria. I gained insight into subtle style differentiae from her, and a lasting love of art history.
Die Wieskirche
31 33	University of Heidelberg	Werner Conze Ernst Topitsch	Conze, my thesis advisor for the Ph.D. I never completed, was a traditional German historian, very competent, with a somewhat modern approach. Topitsch, on the other hand, turned my intellectual world upside down, was revolutionary, inspiring.
35	University of Mannheim	Hans Albert	Albert showed me that a scientific thinker and logician can also be a wonderful human being. Getting to know him personally was what broke down the inhibitions I had had against pursuing a life in science since I was 18, and so was absolutely essential to my starting on the path that ended in my being a computer programmer.
	Alpbach
			Every summer the lovely Austrian village of Alpbach was (still is) the site of the "European Forum", a kind of relaxed conference of professors and graduate students where interesting general topics are explored together. Albert was always there, Topitsch and Popper frequently. I attended four times.
36	London School of Economics	Karl Popper	Never my teacher directly, but it was his ideas that I absorbed from Topitsch and Albert. I also corresponded with him and visited once.
	Other books & teachers (What I've read lately)

Mentors Who Changed My Life

    (a) physics and math, 
    (b) history and politics, 
    (c) music.  

The list of books starts with (a). My experiences at Chicago induced a switch in my focus from (a) to (b). Topitsch's ideas then merged (a) and (b) into one subject area for me, and I end up finally in my choice of profession at just (a) again, with (b) and (c) being sidelined as hobbies.

lternatively, one can see two phases:

    A. Expanding circle of my interest and competence (age: 5 -> 33)
          Emulation figure:
              father -> J.L.(older teenage friend) -> Tesla -> Fermi -> Popper.
          Increasing distance from origins: 
              family -> neighborhood school -> boarding school
              -> big-city university -> German university.
          Accumulating interests: 
              Electricity, physics, mathematics, astronomy, classical music, 
              social science, literature, art, traditional philosophy, 
              political science, European history.
		 
    B. Narrowing of focus (age: 33 -> 47)
          History of philosophy -> philosophy of science -> logic 
          -> computer science -> programming -> Mac programming in C++.

 

Kins (1998)

Hilbert Tu - Resume

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Other books & teachers (What I've read lately)